Grecian Formula

Fresh Light on the Wine-Dark Sea

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: January 5, 1997

AN essay about translations of Homer's ''Odyssey'' should really begin with an ancient invocation, one like the book's own.

Something like, ''Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.'' Or perhaps (in another translation), ''Sing in me, Muse, of that man skilled in all ways of contending.'' Or (in yet a third), ''Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways.''

Then, of course, there is the rendition that may have helped set Keats's blood surging as he first looked into Chapman's Homer, leaving him awestruck, like a ''watcher of the skies'' discovering a planet:

The Man, O Muse, informe, that many a way

Wound with his wisedome to his wished stay.

To each his own Muse, one might say.

And to each the Muse has indeed sung. Homer -- as much a man of twists and turns as his hero Odysseus -- has, with the Muse's help, been translated into countless varieties of English, just as he himself may have translated oral traditions into written verse. His rhythmic Greek has been turned into heroic couplets (Alexander Pope), the cryptic rhetoric that inspired Keats (George Chapman), serviceable prose that reminded one critic of Agatha Christie (E. V. Rieu), and even popular songs like the one Lawrence Durrell imagined Odysseus singing to Circe:

You're bringing out the swine in me

By giving too much wine to me

Though all your promises sound fine to me

But Circe, I simply gotta go.

A Homer for the 90's

Each era has had its Homer, or more correctly, Homers. In a fascinating new anthology published by Penguin Books, the critic George Steiner chronicles a near-millennium of English renditions and inspirations, refractions and reflections of the original.

And now, beginning with the first invocation above, we have one more English version of the ''Odyssey,'' by the Princeton classics professor Robert Fagles. It has become a phenomenon since its recent publication by Viking, with 42,000 copies of the $35 translation in print, along with 10,000 copies of a stirring, unabridged reading on audiotape by Ian McKellan. Meanwhile, Mr. Fagles's earlier translation of the ''Iliad'' has sold 150,000 copies in soft cover.

So sing now, Muse, of how these ancient Greek texts have come to comfortably sojourn in our hardened, cynical, postmodern hearts. For despite the bad reputation dead writers of a certain gender and race have been getting in some academic settings, Homer thrives. In fact, his influence may even be spreading along with that of other representatives of the Western literary heritage. Robert Pinsky's recent translation of Dante's ''Inferno'' has enjoyed healthy sales, Shakespeare is paid homage in movies, and the Book of Genesis has recently become a minor obsession.

But there is something particularly vital in Homer's 2,700-year-old tale, which provided Western culture with its first novel, its first extended epic, and, of course, its first odyssey. The dangers faced during Odysseus's journey home from the Trojan wars have been passed on from generation to generation: the rival cataclysms offered by Scylla and Charybdis, the alluring temptations of the Sirens and Circe and the cannibalism of the Cyclops. What Western quest has not followed a path similar to Odysseus's, one strewn with tests and failures, lures and obstacles, destiny mixing with bewildering freedom? Homer looms over literature like a meddling god from Olympus, making his presence felt in Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Joyce -- even in ''Star Trek'' and comic books.

Translators have helped extend that influence, creating Homer in each era's image. Alexander Pope's extraordinary couplets may have created a Homeric Pope rather than a Popean Homer, but he sought Homer's ''wild paradise'' and ''fire and rapture'' in the rigors of his rhymes. Other translators have invoked the Old Testament, Spencer's poetry, or an ideal of plain-speaking simplicity.

With the appearance of Mr. Fagles's version, which has been widely acclaimed by scholars, three of the most influential modern translations are American. The poet Robert Fitzgerald's 1961 ''Odyssey'' is the most textually intricate, with its luminous imagery and strict pacing inviting pauses and reflection. Richmond Lattimore's 1965 version is probably the most familiar to a generation of American students, but his goal was almost the opposite of Mr. Fitzgerald's; he said he used ''the plainest language'' that would be ''adequate'' to Homer.

In Mr. Fagles's version plainness and poetry come together. He preserves familiar Homeric epithets about the ''wine-dark sea.'' But he notes his is not a line-by-line translation; even the rhythmic character of individual lines is flexibly handled. Mr. Fagles says his approach to translation is like Robert Frost's to democracy: a matter of ''riding easy in the harness.''

This is a contemporary American approach to a classic text, celebrating its ease and freedom for readers who will never be able to turn to the original. There are times the harness's fit is quite modern indeed, with phrases like ''grin and bear it,'' comments about an ''old gaffer'' and a reference to the ''living hell'' of the Trojan war. And while these colloquialisms sometimes jostle against Homer's devotional detail, in which every wash basin and spear wound is lovingly described, and every sighting of man and beast is given the weight of a god's visitation, one feels the rush of a vivid tale, muscularly told.

The result is a fleet-footed rendition whose familiarity emphasizes those aspects of the ''Odyssey'' that resemble modern experience. In this it is quite different from the ''Iliad,'' whose more formal universe consists of battles, rivalries, cultures in extremis. The ''Iliad'' is an account of a society, but Odysseus is barely part of a society at all; his crew rebels, his wife's suitors overrun his home, he spends a year in sybaritic indulgence and another seven held captive by Calypso. He is isolated, again and again.

Odysseus's oft-mentioned trickery, his ''twists and turns,'' (echoed by the twisting narrative) are responses to this world of uncertainty. Nothing is to be relied upon, not even the old modes of heroism. Odysseus himself is almost an anti-hero, leading his men into needless danger, compulsively spinning out lies and testing listeners' loyalties.

Contemporary Echoes

There is something almost contemporary in Odysseus's ever-present sense of solitude and loss, his copious, uncomforting tears. Again and again, in his journeys, he has to struggle against temptations to cease struggling, to sink into an erotic or drugged oblivion. Whether listening to the Sirens or passing by the Lotos eaters, the danger is that he will find contentment in nonhuman forgetfulness. Those dangers are overcome, finally and painfully, as he reconstitutes his social roles as father, husband, son and king.

In Mr. Fagles's swift prose, Odysseus can seem to speak in our modern tongue, in which these sentiments and trials sound all too familiar. One doesn't always like Odysseus -- his nobility mixed with dissemblance, his gentleness mixed with ruthless fury -- but one almost always recognizes him. And so the Muses keep singing to us, of this ancient man with all his contemporary twists and turns.